Adagio in A Minor
by Empatheia
Summary: [Miroku x Kohaku x Koharu] Lessons in dying well and fearing beautifully.


**A/N: **Written for **Numisma**'s birthday. Happy (early) birthday, ye fellow goddess of crack! For you, with love.

**xoxoxoxoxox**

_**Adagio in A Minor**_

**xoxoxoxoxox**

_n._ _pl._ **a·da·gios**

**1. **_Music_ A slow passage, movement, or work, especially one using adagio as the direction.

**2. **A section of a pas de deux in which the ballerina and her partner perform steps requiring lyricism and great skill in lifting, balancing, and turnng.

OooooooO

Miroku was rarely surprised, and even this was not enough to unbalance him.

There she stood, dark hair loose against her arched and pleading back. There _he_ stood, bent over her as though he were a coarse white apple sapling and she a woman-child with greedy fingers.

It had been inevitable, Miroku knew. He and Sango had danced around one another for years, enjoying the waltz but understanding that there would be no offstage, no after-the-dance, not for them. When the music stopped, they would go their separate ways with sad smiles and half-hearted waves and never, ever dance again.

His eyes met Inuyasha's and there was no anger, though he thought that maybe there should be. What about Kagome? No anger. What about Kikyou? No anger, nothing. What about...

"Miroku, I--" Sango started, tightly bound in cords of panic and struggling with what she thought she ought to say.

"Don't. It's all right."

Somehow, strangely, it was. Miroku smiled a beatific, enlightened smile and turned to walk out of the clearing. Behind him, he heard Sango vomit up one strangled, twisted noise that may have been a sob and perhaps might have been her death poem. Inuyasha murmured meaningless reassurances, knowing with his instinctual animal wisdom that all she really wanted was the sound of his voice.Inuyasha and Sango were warriors, and knew how to deal with wounds. They would be fine.

Miroku, on the other hand, and Kagome...

He walked and the smile never left his face. The day was sunny and beautiful and he felt glad to be alive, and a not-so-secret part of him felt glad to finally be free of their quietly destructive waltz.

There was someone in the tree above him. Miroku stopped. "Did you see that, Kohaku?" he asked evenly, smile still playing on his lips.

A slim boy dropped to the ground before him. He was tall, now. It had been years since Sango had needed to bend over to embrace him in that righteous, blunt manner that was all she knew. Kohaku still hadn't learned to turn away when she was convinced everything would be fine.

"I didn't see. I heard, though."

"Ah."

It wasn't fair, Miroku reflected, that a boy should be so damned perceptive when he was dead. Emotions may have been a mystery to the freckle-faced man-child, but he knew when there was tension in the air. It was a gift born of blood and battle and Miroku did not envy him it one little bit.

Kohaku was shifting his weight from foot to foot, which was out of character for him and so Miroku felt compelled to say something.

"Is there something bothering you, Kohaku?"

"I..." It was almost audible, the way the words smashed into each other and died broken, painful deaths in Kohaku's throat.

"Go on, it's all right. I'm not angry."

"I don't understand," Kohaku blurted, then blushed fiercely and hid his eyes beneath long, shadowy bangs.

"Understand what?" Patience, oh, Miroku was made of it today. Nothing in the world could shake him. Nothing in the world.

"When someone you love leaves you like that, aren't you supposed to be hurt and angry? But you don't look angry, or hurt. I don't understand!"

Ah, so that was it. Part of the memory that Kohaku-the-child had forcibly evicted included understanding of human emotion. Kohaku-the-almost-man was slowly relearning it, reaction by glance by expression, but this was so large and _different_ he had no frame of reference for it.

Miroku made a decision. "Would you like me to explain it to you?" he asked.

Kohaku nodded shyly.

"Come with me, then. I'll tell you all you need to know about the way people work, and in exchange you can keep me company. I may be a monk but I hate traveling alone."

Miroku could see the thoughts behind Kohaku's eyes, fluttering and dancing and shrieking protest. The boy thought of his makeshift family, his protectors and his teachers. Then he thought of his sister and contemplated years more of suffering under her suffocating love, of being pulled around by her need to make everything right between them despite the fact that it was all broken and that was fine. Broken was just fine for him, but she would not give in and it drove him mad.

"All right," he answered.

They had no belongings that they did not carry with them, and so they simply turned left rather than right at the next fork in the path and left the huntress and the priestess and the fox and the in-between boy who had brought them all together far behind.

OooooO

_"Why do people hurt each other if they love each other? I thought you just said that loving someone meant wanting the best for them all the time, even at your own expense."_

_"People can be stupid sometimes, Kohaku. Sometimes they forget what love is, and worse yet, sometimes they forget why they do things. Sometimes people even go through life not knowing why they do anything."_

_"Like me, you mean."_

_"Almost, but not quite. Your last conscious decision was made in perfect awareness. You gave up control because you didn't want to face the pain. There are other reasons, some better, some worse. The kind I'm talking about is when people can choose to be aware of their own reasoning and choose not to be because it is easier...well, I suppose then it **is** exactly like you. I don't blame you, though. I would probably have done the same thing."_

_"So Aneue hurt you because she didn't want to think about why she was doing what she was doing?"_

_"Not quite. Your sister tried to hurt me because she was tired of dancing and thought it was the only way to make it stop."_

_"...Dancing?"_

_"What we had was not real, Kohaku. We were dancing for the amusement of ourselves and everyone else, but we knew it would end some time. It has ended now, but I did love dancing with her and so I'm sad to hear the music fade."_

_"This is confusing."_

_"People are confusing, Kohaku. Get used to it."_

_"Do I have to?"_

_"...I suppose you could just stay ignorant if you'd like, but then you'll hurt people around you again. I thought that's what you wanted to avoid."_

_"It is. It's just...hard, I guess."_

_"Most things are, unfortunately. The world is not an easy place to live in. Just think of it as training, and you'll be fine."_

_"Training for what?"_

_"Dying well."_

OoooooO

Miroku knew the place, and had to laugh. It would be here, of course it would. The world hated him so it _would_ be here.

"Miroku-sama!" she cried, her face a mass of emotions so complex he couldn't even look without getting dizzy.

"Koharu." He wanted nothing more than to turn and run on his swift warrior's feet back into the woods and never come out again. He didn't want to face this, didn't want to face _her._ Miroku had sinned many times, but this was the only one he felt real guilt for.

She stared at him, and he saw hope and hate and need and love and desire and contempt and so many other things in her eyes that he had to look away or break.

"Why did you come back?"

Blunt as a hammer, and harder.

"I didn't mean to."

Honesty. It was a virtue, or so he'd heard.

She glared at him and he looked back.

Koharu was grown now, and had the look of a woman who spoke to the earth and heard it answer back. She feared nothing, least of all death, but there were many things that frightened her. It was a contradiction but it made perfect sense to Miroku.

There was nothing left in her of the sniveling, star-struck girl she had been except the ferocity of the way she _felt_.

"I can't believe you had the guts to come back here after what you did back then. You broke my heart, you know, and it's still bloody well broken. You'd have to be stupid or ignorant or both to come back here now."

_Guilty to both_, he thought giddily, and wondered if he had enough leverage to knock himself unconscious with his own _shakujou_. It would temporarily solve a lot of problems for him, being dead to the world.

When he didn't say anything in his own defense, or even change his expression, Koharu visibly slumped and surrendered. "Well, you'll be needing a place to stay then, won't you." It wasn't a question. "This way."

OooooO

It was a small fire, but warm enough and bright enough to banish the cold and dark from the little room. Nobody would ever call it cozy, but it suited the three of them.

It had been three weeks, and somehow Miroku and Kohaku had never quite gotten around to leaving. They helped Koharu tend her meager paddy, mended her shack and chopped the firewood. She rarely spoke, but acquiesced to their continued presence withonly a tilted shoulder and a wryly pursed mouth.

Kohaku, surprisingly, noticed first that the townspeople did not talk to her unless they had to. He told Miroku, and Miroku asked her.

"I am a woman shamed," she answered with perfect equanimity, and tore Miroku's conscience to bleeding ribbons. "They see in black and white, and I am grey, so they ignore me because it's easier."

"Easier than what?" Kohaku pressed, helplessly curious.

"Easier than caring," she answered, and this time there was a flicker of _something_ on her face. It was gone too fast to identify.

She never asked either of them about Sango, and they were thankful for it.

OoooooO

Though she feared nothing, storms frightened her. It was the blinding flash of light, she confessed to him while huddling tearfully in the corner of her not-quite-cozy hut. It made her feel as though every corner of her dirty soul was lit up and shown to the world, and she hated it.

Miroku knew he shouldn't, but he was a sinner and worse than some. His hand on her shoulder felt perfectly wrong and he felt no inclination to leave or gods forbid, do the right thing and leave _forever_.

Kohaku's face was blank and soulless, and by that Miroku knew that he was frightened too. Sometimes it was easy to forget that Koharu and Kohaku were only newly adult and had been children such a short time before.

He held out his arms to both, and both set aside pride in favour of the comfort he offered. Koharu burrowed into his left shoulder, Kohaku into his right, and for the first time in a hurtfully long timeMiroku felt like there was enough of him to go around.

There was music in the thunder. He waited for the cue to dance, but it never came.

**XoxoxoxoxoxoX**

**A/N: **I thought this trio would be hard to write together, but they really weren't. They fell together so naturally I almost didn't notice. I have no idea as to whether this fic makes _any _sense to anyone but me.

**Numisma**, I hope you like it and have a wonderful birthday. :;hugs;:


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